Two decades after the disastrous events of Jurassic Park, Jurassic World is a wildly successful theme park serving millions of visitors every year. That is, until the experimental, genetically modified, highly-intelligent super-predator (because regular dinosaurs are boring, now), Indominus rex, escapes its cage and starts eating people. Oh, and the raptors are trained now.

That’s about all you need to know about the long-awaited fourth installment in the Jurassic Park series. After ten years in development hell and multiple, wildly-varying rumors of scripts, the dinosaurs are finally back on the big screen.

So how was the film? Eh, not as good as I’d hoped. I’d rank it above Jurassic Park III (which isn’t hard to do), but below The Lost World. The movie’s chief flaw is that it tries to do too much, and it’s more than a little derivative. The writers essentially tried to squeeze too many references and plot elements from the first two movies into a two-hour script, making it “bigger, scarier, and cooler”, just like Indominus rex, but the result was disjointed and too short on exposition.

There are also two big technical problems I have. One, I just can’t suspend my disbelief that they couldn’t control the dinosaurs better, even an intelligent hybrid. And two, Mosasaurus was not that big. Probably closer to half the size.

That said, there are a lot of great scenes in the movie, and many of the references to the original film were really well done. I just could have done without the corrupt corporate executives and such. If you liked the original, I would recommend you go see this one, too.

My rating: 3.5 out of 5.